amy bauer The Other of the Exotic: Balinese Music as Grammatical ...

The Other of the Exotic 339
and Cage move directly to the underlying conceit: a more concise, if somewhat
vague, evocation of the other. Paradoxically, the rise of Cage’s conceptual orientalism
coincided with the increasing ubiquity of the non-Western and its
consequent loss of identification with the strange, the mysterious and the sexually
alluring. It is in precisely this sense that the non-Western other comes to
serve a grander and more exalted function in contemporary art music. The
reverse of an exotic that once offered only arabesque or disembodied notions of
purity or objectivity must be that which is neither superficial nor indefinite. The
other of the exotic is the solid, disciplined structure which Corbett lauds in the
minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who use the complexities of cyclic time
to ‘undermine composerly practice’ (Corbett 2000, p. 174).
Ligeti entertained a similarly noble yet somewhat more daunting aspiration:
that of transcending all reductive stylistic affinities in order to produce ‘an
ideologically free style’ [ein ideologiefreier Stil] wherein vagaries of rhythmic
construction, tuning and temperament fuse together to realise a musical language
unique to each work (Ligeti 1993, p. 29). An article in a special issue of
Neue musikalische Zeitung serves as a manifesto of his aesthetic position:
Thirty, actually twenty years ago, more or less, I belonged to a composition group
understood as ‘avant-gardist’, [but] I am no longer tied to any group ideology.The
avant-garde protest action was the political gesture of an elite. With the crash of
the socialist utopia, and with the alteration of technical civilisation through the
diffusion of microelectronics, it is also time for the artistic avant-garde to pass.
Therefore, for me the ‘beautiful’ postmodern appears as a chimera. I look for
‘another’ modernity, either for a ‘back-to’, after a fashion, protest or ‘critique’.
Functional tonality as well as atonality is hackneyed, as well as twelve-tone
equal-tempered tuning. Many ethnic cultures, in Africa and, in exceptional diversity,
in Southeast Asia, present examples of completely different intonation
systems: the pentatonic and heptatonic (equal-tempered and also non-tempered).
Possibilities for divisions of the octave – from Thailand to the Solomon Islands –
allow the salvaging of countless entry points for a new kind of tonality, with other
possibilities for laws than those of [harmonic] function. 10
In a recent review article, Matthew Head (2003) has compiled and interpreted
four orientalist musical paradigms: orientalism as a mask for the critique of
European society; ambivalence towards the other; orientalism and utopia; and
Western music’s otherness. Ligeti’s comments effectively referenced the latter
two as he staked his claim to a place in the historical lineage of composers who
have looked to the East for more than mere refreshment. His notion of the
non-Western drew attention to the reversal of figure and ground which separates
the work of Debussy and Bartók from chinoiserie: ‘Folklore in serious music is
a lie. But Bartók was something else’ (Ligeti 2003, p. 201). 11 The musical
non-Western was no longer an inventory of topics, nor did it subsist, like
post-Cage conceptualism, in a metaphysical cipher which inspired art at one
remove. For Ligeti, the non-Western, as a boundless but definable category,
served as the foundation of a new compositional practice, one which would
Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)
© 2009 The Author.
Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.